The Minister for Finance and Economy Mustafa Mkulo has said effective from next year; the government will finance recurrent expenditure wholly from its own revenue resources.

He said it was untenable that since this country attained independence almost 45 years ago, we still continue to depend on foreign donations to finance even annual recurrent budgets.

About 40 percent of the government`s budget is financed by both multilateral and bilateral donors through budget support mechanism.

Mkullo was responding to parliamentarians` questions at a meeting recently organised by the National Audit Office for strengthening accountability committees of the Parliament.

In his view, the forthcoming 2008/09 budget should at least guarantee that we can pay salaries to public servants and leave development budget to be catered for by aid from donor community.

That goal could be achieved through maximising tax collection, especially effective taxation of natural resources such as forest products and tourism.

He promised that the two tax bases would be carefully be subjected to scrutiny with view to tapping more revenues from some of its untaxed areas.

``To remove donor dependence completely may become impossible because even some developed countries are having some elements of dependence in their budgets although to insignificant levels``, he stressed.

During the meeting, MPs parliamentarians asked questions ranging from inflationary performance to misuse of public funds by various government agencies and lack of government action on perpetrators.

For instance, they raised concerns about massive misuse of road funds from the national, regional to the district levels, mostly seen through construction of substandard roads.

The government admitted existence of huge discrepancies, and promised that since the current Public Procurement Act was being overhauled as proposed by Dr. Mwakyembes probe report, the operations and use of the road fund would soon be rectified.

He also said the government in collaboration with donor community had formed a joint action plan which would be meeting monthly to among other things evaluate developments and actions taken over strengthening of the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) and its supervisory departments.